“Adam Fell that man might be.Man is that he might have joy!” ~Mormon Axiom
The Garden of Eden story in the book Genesis has had theologians debating for centuries exactly what was the fruit which Eve and the Adam partook of which changed their entire prospects for staying in the Garden for ever. Some say they ate an apple others a fig. No one knew of course what the effect was from eating. All seem to agree it caused the “fall” of man. Christian Theologians say it tainted all of Adam’s descendants with sin [ Original sin] requiring baptism at birth to wash away the sin. However, real history clarifies exactly what happened to unlock the meaning and why. There is no mystery if one has an open mind not biased by religious nonsense. Certainly there was no sin involved***.
First, The Garden of Eden story is unquestionably a religious metaphor [if not myth] written by an author tainted with religious notions some thousands of years after the supposed event. The attempt was to give a background history of the establishment of the first parents of the tribes of Israel in a vacuum of ignorance. It was also to give a sense of special worth to a basically uneducated group which had spent 500 years in captivity as slaves.
From that metaphor we understand that at the outset, the tenants, Adam and Eve, had been created as higher spiritual beings and thus were sexually naïve having no knowledge concerning the carnal reproductive capacity of their bodies. They were living in a trancelike robotic state.
One of the metaphorical trees in the garden was the tree of knowledge, the fruit of which was forbidden. Eve being curious partook of the fruit thus gaining some knowledge. The result was that she “fell” from her lofty state of ignorance to the level of learning i.e., carnal knowledge. Falling to a temporal being infers strongly that Eve on her own made a first discovery of her sexuality with a resulting orgasm by masturbation. Thus she became aware of her genitals and the extreme pleasure of eroticism before Adam did.
Moreover, being so enamored by the eroticism of it she persuaded Adam to also eat the “fruit” that he too may have the same knowledge. By the initial experience being self induced; groundwork was laid at the very beginning of the origins of [Biblical] mortality that the knowledge of eroticism of the sexual experience was prior to procreation. That is to say that masturbation created the first sexual knowledge of the pair. That knowledge was a prerequisite for procreation.
Without the erotic experience sought for by sexual intercourse [copulating] there is no reason to think that procreation would of itself occur unless humankind was confined to the reptilian brain of lower animals. [We are talking about Adam and Eve in their ignorant state] Moreover, if God only wanted mankind to replenish the earth, he would have had no need to instill in man the extreme/powerful/motivating higher sense of enticing eroticism. Eroticism is a gift of God to man and for no reason other than love. It is not the bi-product of procreation, just the reverse.
Metaphorically, the pair was then driven from Eden as carnal mortals. Being driven from the lush garden of plenty has been called the fall of man. In reality it was recognition of the rise of man for without the “fall” mankind would not be. Adam and Eve would still be in the garden after millenniums in their sexual ignorance looking at each other perhaps wondering why they exist!
Having experienced the fruit of carnal knowledge, thereafter, whenever Adam had sexual relations with Eve the Bible says that Adam “knew” Eve and thus we have the beginning of the term “carnal knowledge”****. After carnal knowledge Eve would “beget” a child. The Bible is silent on the issue of what may have transpired sexually between Adam and Eve between the times of “knowing” and “begetting”. Nor are we told that every “knowing” resulted in a “begetting”!
However, from human experience we can deduce that desire for extreme personal pleasure of sexual eroticism so far out weighed the possibility of pregnancy that likely there was a lot of “knowing” before, after and even during the dutiful “begetting” until Mosaic Law forbade it during pregnancy and at other times. But Mosaic Law came about three thousand years after Eden.
Also the Genesis story of the Bible comes at a point in history some thousands of years after the real time appearance of Homo sapiens on planet earth. Without question sexual intercourse and reproduction was experienced between the populations along with historically established acceptance of divergent life styles without the need for the Genesis story.
Obviously couples had discovered over those thousands of years as did mythical Adam and Eve, that joint sexual intercourse was superior to primary masturbation for it allowed the shared experience of the hopefully timed unity of orgasm. For those who desired that experience with a limited chance of procreation, coitus was learned in which the phallus was withdrawn before ejaculation.
Yet the very personal act of masturbation was safe from the risk of unwanted pregnancy. Later, same-sex eroticism was employed to obtain a limited sensation of mutual copulation but without risk of procreation. And the existence of inborn gender anomalies presented an even more difficult situation of sexual identity and intercourse for a minority of humans.
It is unfortunate for humanity that the mythical Adam and Eve Genesis story hitched a ride on a moving train of real history as the story of their being the first parents on the planet was believed only by the descendants of Abraham until after the Christianization of the world and the dark ages which followed it. The problem being that strict personal sexual conduct proscribed in the Torah for those of Abrahamic lineage was later imposed on masses of humanity as Christian writers accepted the proscriptions even enlarging on them. .
With Christianization the world was largely forced to believe the Genesis story by compiling the Old Testament with the New Testament under single cover of the Bible. The continuity factor being Jesus, a Jew with attempts to identify him as Shiloh or the Messiah fulfilling prophesies in the Old Testament. This mating incorporated some but not all of the personal proscriptions of Judaism into Christian morality. Usury [lending money at interest] was a sin which far outweighed any sexual sin.
When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire its moral codes came into conflict with thousands of years of human history particularly that of Greece and Rome in which homosexuality was an accepted anomaly.
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